Mobile Cloud Computing & It's Future

Introduction

We have been observing some significant technology trends for the last few years. Mobile and communication has become the integral part of our life style. At the same time cloud computing is coined up as new shift in terms of data storage and accessibility when it comes to IT infrastructure. As these two things are catching up lots of attention of businesses and researchers, and the combination of these two technologies is gearing up the future called – Mobile Cloud Computing.

Research and analyst data show how profoundly these technologies have created a reverberation in the technology landscape around the world. An explosion of mobile and handheld devices is also significantly contributing to world IP data traffic. To support such data demand, cloud computing seems to be the right choice because of its rapid scalability, ubiquitous network access, on-demand self-service and other features.

In this synopsis, we will discuss the following

- Mobile Computing (MC) and Cloud Computing (MC) with its pros and cons

- Mobile Cloud computing and the underlying opportunities and challenges

- and finally the Problem Statement

What is Mobile Computing (MC)?

Mobile computing involves mobile communication, mobile hardware, and mobile software. Communication issues include ad hoc and infrastructure networks as well as communication properties, protocols, data formats and concrete technologies. Hardware includes mobile devices or device components.

In other words, Mobile Computing is nothing but “taking a computer and all necessary files and software out into the field". Mobile computing is any type of computing which use Internet or intranet and respective communications links, as WAN, LAN, WLAN etc. Mobile computers may form a wireless personal network.

There are at least three different classes of mobile computing items as portable computers (laptops, notebooks, notepads), mobile phones (cellphones, smartphones etc.) and wearable computers (watches, wristbands, Google Glasses etc.)

Advantages

What is Cloud Computing (CC)?

Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient and on demand network access to a shared group of computing resources that can be rapidly released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. Cloud has advantages in offering more scalable, fault-tolerant services with even higher performance. Also, Cloud computing can be referred to as a new kind of storage technology, by which we can share software, data or documents to computers as well as other devices on demand.

What is Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC)?

The term mobile cloud computing began appearing soon after cloud computing gained some credibility. It is only logical that if you can offload expensive operations from computers, why not do it on mobile devices that are becoming increasingly similar to PC’s? However MCC technology is faced with not only the standard concerns of cloud computing, but there’s also the inherent problems of connectivity, or lack thereof. How do you base something completely off of internet access when it cannot even be guaranteed in most of the world?

Since owning a mobile device that’s connected to the internet has become the norm in the wireless world of today, MCC has a very large potential user base. Some apps already exist which utilize this approach. One example is the rapidly growing movie streaming service Netflix[19]. With the official app and a Netflix service subscription it’s possible to stream an entire movie in high definition to a mobile device without using up any of the devices local storage. This is only one example of how cloud technology opens up possibilities that were never possible before.

If mobile cloud computing can follow the trend of regular cloud computing to receive widespread adoption, the separation between mobile platforms and their respective operating systems (iOS, Android etc.) would slowly fade away. All mobile devices would access services and applications the same way (e.g. by using HTML5) and their hardware performance would no longer matter as all computation would be done “in the cloud”, on a virtual device, and then sent back to the user. This could also potentially prolong battery life and lower device costs[10], as more expensive hardware would no longer be necessary.

The aim of this thesis is to evaluate what kind of performance and features one can expect from a cloud based application on a mobile device, what effects it will have on the device that runs it in terms of power consumption and performance, and to analyze issues that can emerge when running cloud based applications on mobile devices.

Two major constraints for mobile cloud computing are limited energy and wireless bandwidth. Studies[8] have been conducted on power consumption for cloud and non­cloud based applications and these studies show that the cloud based applications consume more power than the non­cloud ones. They believe that this is because of the WiFi interface on mobile devices being a large factor in power consumption. But a lot of progress has been made in wireless performance since the studies by Namboodiri and Ghose (2012)[8] and our theory is that the WiFi interface has improved to such an extent that power consumption of cloud based applications is now much smaller.

Other concerns with mobile cloud computing are hardware with less computational capacity and availability. We believe that the computational issue can be solved by moving the “heavy lifting” to dedicated computers in the cloud. This has been proven to work in a desktop environment with the thin client architecture that is already being used in many businesses and schools. With the continued development and expansion of 4G we also believe that the availability issue can be resolved.

As with all new technologies, there will be problems and hurdles to overcome. The purpose of the evaluation is to identify what problems the technology will initially face. We will then survey our key forums for already proposed solutions, or come up with our own in order to alleviate these problems. We also aim to identify as many advantages of mobile cloud computing as possible. Ultimately we wish to prove that there are no critical drawbacks to using cloud-based technology, and if there is we want to solve them.

Challenges

- Will remote computation (cloud computing) decrease power consumption on mobile devices?

- Are there any drawbacks associated with running cloud-based applications on mobile devices compared to running native ones?

- Are there any other advantages to running cloud-based applications on mobile devices compared to running native ones?